Help! How do I paint myself out of this?

Factual Questions
1

Thanks for the responses to my “How Old is My House” question. I forgot to check the thread and don’t want to re-animate the zombified.

My latest adventure in renovating: I very, very carefully primed and then painted one of the bedrooms with a color that was supposed to be brown, but has dried to an ugly baby diarhhea umber (I think the stupid Home Depot girl mis-mixed it). I dread having to prime again, as the room has a lot of angles, moldings, etc and it took me a whole day of taping and painting to just lay down the primer.

Is there any hope for getting another color to stick without primer? The finish on the ugly paint is eggshell semi-gloss and the underlying wall substrate is plaster.

2

Primer is to help paint stick to unpainted surfaces. Paint sticks very well to paint, however, so you should be ok just repainting.

3

Sure, just repaint, and reconcile yourself to the idea that you’re gradually making your room smaller and smaller…
Seriously, just repaint. If you want to be sure, do a test paint in an unobtrusive corner and make sure the new sticks to the old and none of the old bleeds through.

4

That’s not all primer is for. Mixed paint is designed to be the correct color going over white primer. If you paint over another color, it will not be exactly the same. Just something to consider.

5

If you only painted a portion of it baby diarrhea, you could use a product like Kilz just on that part.

6

Unfortunately, I kept going and going, caught in some kind of “it’ll look better when it dries completely” hypnotic state.

7

You might want to compare the original color swatch with the wall, and see how different they really are. Colors are relative, and the color of a room will look very different from the same color in a little 2x2 swatch. Ask my neighbors, who painted their entire house fluorescent bubble-gum pink :eek:.